Learn the Fundamentals of Kubernetes for Software Developers

Let’s get started with the mysterious k8s

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes is commonly referred to as k8s for simplicity since there are 8 characters between k and s. Kubernetes is widely used in the modern software development practice and is available in all major cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Service (AWS).

Photo by Samuel Sianipar on Unsplash.

Compared to traditional monolithic and virtualized deployment practices, Kubernetes brings revolutionary changes, including self-healing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, automatic resource management, secret and configuration management, service discovery and load balancing, and storage orchestration, etc. If you want to learn more about the introduction of Kubernetes, you can check the official document of Kubernetes. In this post, I will give hands-on examples of Kubernetes and explain the most important concepts for software developers such as Pod, Deployment, Namespace, etc. Command-line examples and YAML configuration files will also be explained with easy-to-understand terms. Besides, there are two bonuses for using Kubernetes in this post which can be very helpful for you as a software developer, don’t miss them :-).

As a software developer, you normally don’t need to install a Kubernetes cluster in your institution by yourself. This should be done by your system administrator or provided by your cloud provider. However, for learning purposes, it’s better not to mess with the production cluster. Luckily, there is a very convenient tool called minikube which can spin up a local Kubernetes cluster on your laptop/desktop quickly. Minikube is perfect for learning, development, or testing purposes.

On Linux, the commands to install minikube are:

Then you can start up your cluster by:

$ minikube start